Now that the new IT film has become a huge hit I thought I’d follow-up on my post about the movie last week. I’m not surprised that the film has done as well as it has, and I’m also not surprised to hear that the movie’s success has lead to another King property getting snatched-up for the silver screen treatment. Here’s io9 with the word…

Announced mere hours after the huge box office numbers for It were reported, King’s 1972 short story Suffer the Little Children is the first one off the board. Sean Carter will write and direct an adaptation for Bread & Circuses Entertainment.

“The Stephen King aesthetic has been imprinted into my psyche since I was a teenager, and Suffer the Little Children fits right into that classic King paradigm: a tragically flawed lead character put into a shockingly unimaginable scenario,” Carter told Deadline. “It’s a tiny peek into a mythology that I can’t wait to expand into a full-length movie.”

First published in 1972 but more widely distributed in King’s 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes, Suffer the Little Children flips the It idea. In this, the kids are the potential villains and a teacher is the hero. She spends the story trying to figure out if her students are human or not.

Here’s an audiobook version of the story. It’s only about a half hour long so just listen in the background while you’re working or playing, and get the background on the next hit King film…

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The new Psychedelic Sex book published by Taschen this spring is currently being sold on eBay for $69. That’s a silly point to make about what amounts to a seriously in-depth look at what happened to the burgeoning culture of “men’s magazines” when they ran smack into the psychedelic revolution in the 1960′s.

During a tiny, titillating window between 1967 and 1972, LSD, the sexual revolution, pop art graphics and the go-go entrepreneurialism that’s always been the hallmark of the pornography industry all combined in a cauldron of hippie chicks, surfer girls and counterculture couplings that created “psychedelic sex.” While the freaks flew their flags of free love and good drugs in San Francisco, men’s magazine publishers were anxious to sell the revolution to the squares on the sidelines.

Magazines like Way Out and Where It’s At attempted to capture the aesthetics of psychedelic culture beginning at the place where the jeans and the fringe and the flowers hit the floor. In a sense, the magazines were playing catch-up — the actual permissiveness and experimentation that was happening in the youth culture of the time was making the forbidden fruit that men’s magazines always claimed to offer look like something much more boring that what might have been happening on a college campus or after hours at the coffeehouse.

Like Hollywood films and television of the era, these magazines ultimately had to be satisfied with presenting a facsimile of the hippie lifestyle, but there’s something refreshingly honest and direct and innocent about these pictures of real people with real natural bodies that makes contemporary magazine photography in any genre look cold, slick, machined and unreal. The book also recalls a time when a premium nudie magazine would have to be purchased in person for a pretty penny, long before the internet make similar images available for nothing and in private, devaluing both the images and the viewer according to Taschen’s Sexy Books Editor, Dian Hanson.

Make no mistake, Psychedelic Sex is a pornographic publication full of outrageous images from six years of niche publications that capture the psychedelic era in a wild spread of flesh, fantasy, paisley and pop art. The book is gorgeous and hilarious and — at the risk of sounding like a square myself — it also includes two illuminating essays by collector Eric Godtland and that timeless spokesman of the 1960′s, the “father of the underground press,” Paul Krassner.

The book measures in at 408 pages and comes in a great pop art slipcase.

To get you in the mood for, er, reading, here’s a chapter from Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations audiobook in which he recounts a boudoir encounter under the influence of datura and DMT. Bizarre. Freaky. Hilarious…

Psychedelic SEX Terence Mckenna recounts having sex on high doses of datura and DMT from Ethereal Exposition on Vimeo.

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It’s common for folks like myself and the readers of this blog to frequent sites and browse magazines filled with articles about leaps in information processing, advances in artificial intelligence and the future of human/machine interfacing. It’s the 21st century after all, and even though many of our institutions and officials are woefully culture-bound to reality paradigms that were cast aside many decades ago, the rest of us are living in the future and busy helping to define what tomorrow will be instead of allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by perceived, pessimistic inevitabilities.

We’re used to this kind of thinking and these ideas in 2015, but we can also feel the anxiety of trying to maintain a sense of self and place when the very nature of information seems to be changing, and changing everything we understand about ourselves and the world around us.

Some folks saw this coming almost 50 years ago, and you can watch a movie about it. Here’s the skinny from a YouTube page about Future Shock…

‘Future Shock’ is a documentary film based on the book written in 1970 by sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler. Released in 1972, with a cigar-chomping Orson Welles as on-screen narrator, this piece of futurism is darkly dystopian and oozing techno-paranoia… A great opening features a montage of car crashes and civil unrest intercut with two figures walking
in a green field (while creepy synthesizers play in the background) who are soon revealed to be automatons with creepy robot faces — a nice metaphor for the fear of the unrecognizable, cold, and chaotic future society that Toffler thought we were all headed for…

So what exactly is “Future Shock”? Sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler explains: “We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism’s physical adaptive systems
and it’s decision-making processes… Put more simply, future shock is the human response to over-stimulation…”

“Toffler’s main argument is that humanity (as of 1970, when the book was written), is in the midst of an enormous shift from an industrial society to a super-industrial society; this new society will be characterized by such things as an acceleration of images, words, ideas, and technologies that could possibly overwhelm mankind, resulting in a serious disconnect when
these new ideas reach their fruition (if not well before then). This disconnect is ‘future shock’, an inability to process the enormous amounts of information and change associated with the super-industrial revolution.

This is Future Shock…

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Another recent viewing of random programs on Nashville’s over-the-air digital television paid off this past Saturday night when my girlfriend and I discovered this mind-blowing trip of a flick based on Lewis Carroll’s books. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a 1972 British musical that features a great cast in a psychedelic journey that makes Tim Burton’s Alice seem calm, orderly and decidedly un-scary. This version finds Peter Sellers playing the March Hare, Dudley Moore as the humble Dormouse and future Bond Girl Fiona Fullerton in the title role.

Fullerton is especially good in her reading of Alice as a sassy redhead who never seems to do as she’s told. Here’s an entry from George’s Journal discussing the popularity of Alice’s story in the psychedelic age:

And, when you get down to it, it’s really no surprise the young and the hip of the ’60s (whether artists or their followers) found Alice’s adventures so psychedelic, surreal and, well, druggy. I mean, not only do they contain anthropomorphic characters ranging from the seemingly over-stimulated (Hatter) to the seemingly sleepily stoned (The Dormouse) and from the paranoid (The White Rabbit) to the actually visually ambiguous (The Cheshire Cat), one of them is even smoking a hookah-pipe (the always chilled out Caterpillar). Quite frankly, all of them seem to be tripping…

Associations of Alice with drug culture were to be seen everywhere at the time. While the ‘Disneyfied’ image of The Cheshire Cat was a constant on LSD blotters, Alice herself actually tripping was alluded to in a black-and-white, feature-length Alice In Wonderland adaptation, directed by former Beyond The Fringe member Jonathan Miller and broadcast by the BBC on December 28 1966 (see video above). Typical family fare for Christmas this was not, as the ‘Eat me’/ ‘Drink me’ sequence in which Alice grows larger and smaller was treated as if her activities were inducing her into a drugged state. No question, this version is a dark take on Dodgson’s work; Miller decided to film the animal characters as human characters, believing the story to be a cypher for a girl’s fears about the grown-up world around her: “Once you take the animal heads off, you begin to see what it’s all about. A small child, surrounded by hurrying, worried people, thinking ‘Is that what being grown-up is like?”…

Inspiration by, adaptation of and reference to Alice’s adventures didn’t end in the ’60s, though. Like it or not, they’ve been a veritable constant of modern culture. As soon as the early ’70s, Dodgson’s books were once again mined as the source for a major family film in the shape of Alice In Wonderland (1972). British-made, thoroughly charming and fondly recalled, this movie musical boasts future Bond Girl Fiona Fullerton as the heroine…and the cream of British acting talent, such as Ralph Richardson, Robert Helpmann, Michael Hordern and Spike Milligan, among others…

I found the entire film on the Curiouser and Curiouser YouTube channel which is an amazing repository of film and television versions of all things Alice. Here’s the flick…

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